Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Could I see you for a moment?” one of the detectives, short and squat and with light hair, said quietly. Owney followed them down to a room off the nurses’ station. Dolores walked with them.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this to you, but we think we got a real good chance with this thing,” the squat detective said. “Your father got mugged about ten o’clock. Now there have been a few muggings in that area and we brought along a couple of pictures we’d like you to look at.”

  “I wasn’t there when it happened,” Owney said.

  “They said you were in the bar with him,” the detective said.

  “I left way earlier. How you know it was a mugging?”

  “That’s what we think. Maybe you ought to take a look at these pictures, anyway.”

  “I didn’t see anybody when I left.”

  “Right now, you might think you didn’t. But maybe you happened to notice someone who was hanging around on the street, and the face might come back to you now, if you see it again.”

  The second detective, whose stomach pushed against the button of a blue blazer, had five photos spread out on the table.

  “Why do you say he was mugged?” Owney said.

  “He had no money on him,” the squat detective said.

  “He had a lot of money when I left him there,” Owney said.

  “That’s it,” the detective said.

  “How do we know somebody else didn’t take his money?” Owney said.

  “Who?” the detective said.

  “A cop. Or somebody in the ambulance. They hit his wallet, and we could be here looking for a mugger who never was.”

  The squat detective closed his eyes and blew out air. “In case you don’t know it,” he said with irritation, “we got a war going on out there. It’s as bad as any war you ever heard of.”

  “Oh,” Owney said.

  “And I’m out there on the firing line. Right in the front. And you’re not helping me fight the war with that attitude you got.”

  “There’s only one good thing to come out of the whole night,” Owney said. “That I know I’m not as dumb as you.”

  “I don’t have to take that,” the detective said.

  “Do what you want,” Owney said.

  The second detective smiled. “We know you’re upset. Why don’t you just take one look at these pictures for us.”

  Owney leaned over the desk and glanced at photos of five black Hispanics, who had mustaches or scraggly beards.

  “They don’t mean anything to me,” Owney said. He took Dolores’s hand and started out of the room.

  “Don’t you care who hit your father?” the detective in the blazer asked.

  “Yeah, that’s why I don’t have any time to waste with you,” Owney said.

  They went back to the room and when another doctor came up at six o’clock, Dolores spoke to him and listened as the doctor mentioned types of bleeding—subdural, epidural—and then spoke again about the father’s reflexes being fine. Dolores listened intently and Owney let her run the conversation. At six-thirty in the morning, when he saw his father’s leg move in the bed, Owney looked at Dolores, who smiled, and now he suddenly felt tired.

  On the other side of the hallway, the two detectives were looking into a room where, in the bed nearest the door, Sharon the barmaid was muttering, “Sharon has nothing to say. Except that they shouldn’t have hit Sharon. They shouldn’t have done that to Sharon.”

  It took two days for the father to come out of it. When he did, he sat propped up in bed and stared with eyes that were filled with blood.

  “Well?” Owney said.

  “Baseball,” the father muttered.

  “Is that what it was?” Owney said.

  “O’Sullivan,” the father said.

  The silver hair was in Owney’s mind now. The next thing he thought of was a gun.

  The father’s eyes tried to follow Owney as he left. “Hey!”

  “Coffee,” Owney said. He was out the door and into the hall. He paused for a moment and looked into the room where Sharon now sat up in bed. Her discolored forehead hung like a ledge over her eyes.

  “See what they did to Sharon?” she said of herself.

  Owney went to the elevator banks.

  He turned onto Forest Avenue and stopped at a two-story frame house that had gray aluminum siding and a front door with new black paint. Ralphie Schmidt sat on the edge of the flat roof, his legs dangling, the sunbathed right arm raised over his head and waving a hammer.

  “Up here,” he said.

  “I see you,” Owney said.

  “You got to take care of roofs,” Ralphie said. “You don’t take care of the roof, then you won’t have, a roof over your head, you know?”

  “I want to talk to you,” Owney said.

  “So talk.”

  “No, I want to see you.”

  “You need something?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Schmidt brought the hammer down on the roof. “My man!” He pulled himself from the edge of the roof and disappeared. Owney went up the stoop and was about to press the bell when a woman with heavy bare arms and wearing a housedress pulled the door open.

  “He’s yelling at me to let you in,” she said.

  “Hello, Mrs. Schmidt.”

  “Come in, Owney. How’s the baby?”

  “She’s fine. You look good, Mrs. Schmidt,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you, it’s an accident, living with him.”

  There was a staircase as they entered and Ralphie Schmidt stood at the top, his teeth showing in a great smile. Ralphie led Owney into his bedroom, where he had draped across the headboard a belt of .50 caliber bullets, the brass dull in the bedroom shadows. On the night table was a large framed photo of a dead Vietnamese. He had been naked in order to keep loose clothing from tripping any detectors. Ralphie always insisted that the body was missing a leg when he first saw it, and so he picked up a loose leg from another body and fitted it onto the one he photographed. As evidence of this, Ralphie always pointed to the feet and then at the caption he had printed with a marking pen: “Two left feet. Photo by Ralphie.”

  Schmidt now stood in the closet and held a heavy black pistol with a short barrel. “Three fifty-seven. Beautiful.”

  Owney took it and stuffed it into the right pocket of his fatigue jacket.

  “Ralphie, you take care of my car.”

  “What do I have to do with it?”

  “Make sure nobody steals it.”

  Ralphie went to the window. “I shoot from here if they try.”

  Owney stepped toward the door.

  “Are you sick?” Ralphie said. He held out a box of bullets.

  “Good man,” Owney said, taking them.

  “I’m not even asking you what it’s for,” Schmidt said.

  “Thanks, Ralphie.”

  Owney walked down to Fresh Pond Road and used a phone in the bar across the street from the Four One’s car service. He asked Danny Murphy, the numbers guy from work, about O’Sullivan. Murphy, who knew the bars men attended as others know the colleges people went to, said that O’Sullivan hung around a place called the Green Fields bar on Eleventh Avenue, on the West Side of Manhattan. “I think he might even own the joint,” Danny said.

  On the way to the city, he had the driver play the radio as loud as it would go; the Grateful Dead filled the car. Owney wanted the Rolling Stones. He did not think of where he was going or what he was going to do there. He knew only one thing: the man had hit his father.

  He got out of the cab at 48th and Eleventh and looked for the bar. He walked two blocks and then came to an appliance store that had Spanish music howling from a loudspeaker over the entrance and next door to it was the Green Fields bar. When Owney walked in, everything suddenly was heightened: the bartender’s face, wrinkled from alcohol, the two men in olive-drab work shirts at the end of the bar, the young guy in the sweat shirt on the wall phone, the man sitting at a black Formica table and reading
a newspaper that was wreathed in his cigarette smoke. No silver-haired man. No O’Sullivan. Owney walked to the men’s room, opened the door, saw it was empty, and came back and sat in the middle of the bar, at the aluminum drain under the taps. The smell of wood soaked with last night’s beer filled the room.

  “Beer,” Owney said.

  The bartender put a cigarette in a red tin ashtray and pulled a beer. Cold new smell in last night’s air.

  “I’m supposed to see a guy here,” Owney said.

  The bartender stared at the beer. His neck showed he preferred no such conversation. “Who was it you were looking for?” he said finally.

  “O’Sullivan.”

  “He went by his sister. She works usher today.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You don’t know the sister?” His voice had a new coat of apprehension.

  “I only know O’Sullivan,” Owney said.

  The bartender called to the men in the work shirts down at the end. “Which one does Sissy work at?”

  “The one on Forty-sixth Street. The Lyceum.”

  “That’s tonight,” Owney said.

  “Matinee today. Two o’clock show, she gets there one o’clock. Gets her programs together and everything, goes to work.”

  Owney finished the beer, pushed change at the bartender, and then held his fingers on the change. “Give us one more.” Owney drank it in two gulps, threw a dollar onto the change, and left. He put his hands in his pockets, the left one gripping the gun, and walked back to 46th Street and then started cross-town, toward the theatre district, first going past old West Side buildings with fire escapes on the fronts and women with sparse gray hair and arms as thin as wire, smoking cigarettes at windows that had old flowered curtains. The next street was lined with restaurant awnings that stuck out of the bottoms of brownstones. He was under the third awning when he heard another sound, a steady squeaking, although there was no breeze coming up from the river to cause the canvas to pull on the brass poles holding it up.

  Owney stopped in the squeaking. “What’s the time?” he asked the doorman.

  “Five a twelve.”

  Owney glanced into the restaurant. There was a polished bar that had curved brass decorations that caught subdued light, and a bartender’s fresh white linens formed a background for the brass. The apron in particular seemed so white and stiff that the hands would have to wring it to cause any wrinkling. A waiter in stiff white linens carried a silver plate of oysters on a bed of ice that glistened in the lights. The bartender picked up a clear bottle, vodka, and began to pour a drink.

  Owney saw a clear, cold brook on a hot day. The squeaking was louder. And now Jack McAuliffe stood in the air over a cement sidewalk that was supposed to be in Manhattan but was really the alley behind Herbridge’s pool hall in Terre Haute, Indiana. The part of the alley right by the garbage cans, the exact same spot where he started his American career by fighting a cop with a fresh mouth. Jack McAuliffe hit the cop in the mouth with two of the five punches he threw. He was a kid, then, and he was wild with the left hook. The cop still was on his feet. Jack McAuliffe took care of that with a butt. He split open both the cop’s eyes and left him sitting atop the garbage cans. Then Jack ran out of town and became a scarred old champion. Now, over the sidewalk and under the awning, Jack McAuliffe rocked his head back and brought it forward, right into Owney’s face.

  “How are you today?” the bartender in the fresh white linens asked Owney as he sat down.

  “I don’t know if I’m dressed for here,” Owney said, moving his shoulders inside the fatigue jacket.

  There were two women having an early lunch at a table a step away from the bar and one of them, in her late forties, with large round glasses perched on her nose, looked up at Owney. “I think the jacket is cute. This is the theatre district. You’re supposed to dress like that.”

  “If you say so,” Owney said.

  “Absolutely.”

  The woman smiled and went back to her conversation with a light-haired woman who leaned across the table and said, hungrily, “Now continue.”

  Owney looked at the bottles behind the bar and pointed to the pale one. “Vodka martini.”

  The bartender nodded and poured. Owney couldn’t remember the last mixed drink he had ordered, but he knew he had to do something in a place like this—he couldn’t tell the guy a beer and Fleischmann’s—but as he held the drink, he decided that there was something the matter with it. There was something the matter with taking a drink that had almost no odor; it was somehow mixed up with the secrecy of drug taking. Vodka. The least you ought to be able to do is smell the poison you’re taking. Then Owney drank the martini like it was a beer and it sure didn’t taste bad and he had the glass out for another. Owney tasted the cigarette smoke and at the table near him, the woman with round glasses laughed.

  “… I get to Bergdorf’s and on the lingerie floor they have everything on sale. They have it all out on racks. These lovely, filmy things. Delicious. I went through a couple of racks and then I found this one nightgown I absolutely adored, loose and long. You were wearing mist. I was thinking that I could take this gold chain I have and use it as a belt on it.”

  “Exciting,” the light-haired woman said.

  “Absolutely. Then up she comes. Just walked up to me out of nowhere.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to me, ‘Well, I hope you have somebody special to wear that for!’”

  “She really caught you.”

  “That was before I knew what kind of a life she was leading.”

  The two women laughed and began to pick at the oysters on the plates of ice and Owney took a sip and then a large swallow of his second martini. The conversation he had heard caused the blood to rush between his legs. He thought of the woman in the Bronx in her nightgown looking out the side door in the morning. He saw himself finding a hole in the fence up there and following the little kid right up to the door and talking to her, with her moist breasts hanging out of the nightgown in the morning. He was astonished at how quickly his mind could succumb to the temptation of a woman. Walking along neat mowed grass, breathing clean bright air, and suddenly there is a woman and the grass turns into an ugly grave with gray dirt rising to cover you. The Devil is a fearsome enemy, he thought.

  Quickly, casting the vision out of his mind, he picked up the martini and drained it. He paid, and then, his hand gripping the gun in the jacket pocket, he walked past the women whose talk provoked his prick, and into the street to find a real enemy, O’Sullivan. He never noticed Jack McAuliffe outside the bar, for McAuliffe now was asleep on a rubbing table. His old boxing shoes were soundless. He had won for the day.

  Smoking a cigarette, Owney wandered through the lunchtime crowds. He stopped at an outdoor stand on Broadway for coffee and a hot dog. The head had to be cleared, for he had to plan what he was going to do to O’Sullivan. Owney saw himself jabbing the gun into O’Sullivan and forcing him into an alley someplace, or down into the back of a parking garage, and then he would give this dirty old bastard the beating of his life. Open his head with the gun butt. If the fucking thing went off, that would be too bad, too. Just make sure to get the guy alone someplace.

  It was twenty after one when he finally got to the Lyceum; the marquee told him Borstal Boy was playing. One of the polished brass doors swung open and Owney went in.

  “Yessir,” the ticket taker said. “Sir?”

  Owney was through the door and into the rear of the orchestra. A short, heavy woman in a black dress stood in his way. She held out a Playbill.

  “I’m not going to sit,” Owney said. “I’m looking for Sissy O’Sullivan.”

  The woman turned and pointed to the white-haired woman usher who stood at the last aisle of the orchestra.

  Owney walked up to her. She pulled out a Playbill.

  “Is your brother around?” Owney said.

  “He was just here,” she said. “He just come over to see m
e and he was …”

  Owney looked at the fat head with the silver hair slicked straight back. A fat crimson neck at the bottom of the silver hair. He was seated halfway down on the right side of the aisle. He was one of the first ones seated. Look at him. Empty seats all around him. Now Owney saw the red exit lights on the wall. Bright red light. He saw the silver hair, shining in the red light. He saw the size of the silver head and the distance from the wall, two red seats with black armrests. Owney walked down the aisle. He could feel the breath as it came through his nose and down his throat and into his lungs. He could feel the floor under him, as if he were walking barefooted. He could smell the dust from the curtain and the old wood of the stage and his left hand went into the fatigue pocket and took out the gun. He switched it to his right hand and held it against his pants leg. He had no trouble doing this, for his hands were still and his nerves were suddenly coming down, down, down, and no part of him moved unless he wanted it to and he saw and thought more clearly than he had in a couple of years. He walked up to the row and leaned in and the gun was coming up. Put it right into his ear. And then the silver-haired man turned and Owney looked into a red face and Roman collar.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse me, Father,” Owney said.

  The silver-haired man stared for a second, shrugged, and turned back to his Playbill.

  Owney smuggled the gun into his jacket and walked back up the aisle.

  “You thought that was my brother,” O’Sullivan’s sister said. “I tried to tell you, he left for Florida. You get him down there tonight.”

  Owney pushed open one of the polished brass doors and went into the sun on the sidewalk. His scalp tingled. His forehead and hands were wet. He sat on the curb. His body quivered.

  The theatre doorman walked up to him. “You ought to pull in your feet. Cab’ll come along and run right over them. I don’t want nobody hurt here.”

  “You’re right,” Owney said.

  The next drink was a Fleischmann’s, which turned into formaldehyde in his mouth. He sucked in cigarette smoke against the taste. The diesel engine of a bus outside on Metropolitan Avenue in Ridgewood shook the windows and outthrobbed the juke box. He had the loaded gun in his pocket and a mind aching from his walk on the lip of the earth. Danny Costello, who had gone to high school with Owney, was at the bowling machine, grinding the weight back and forth. When the bus outside pulled away, the juke box again filled the room.